Tesla's We, Robot Event: Let’s Not Get Nuanced

40:38So the incentive is to make money. Yes. Because otherwise I could just walk outside, hop in any car that's driving by and go home. Yeah, but then you have to pay money. Yeah. In a perfect world where a car, I could just like take a nap on my hour commute. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. I don't want it to come out there and be like, I hate the idea of having to pay attention my whole commute. No, I would much rather watch a movie. Maybe I would actually watch Dune if that happened. But there's just so many other things wrong. That is not the part I'm hating on. Cool, there are tons of people who would rather take a nap in their car than drive.

41:14There's just so many other things wrong with this. Every single thing that this addresses is already addressed 50 times better by a f***ing bus. Which they also mean. Not really in America. Currently at the moment. In some places, yes. In the city. Yeah. In this city. Yeah, in this city. Yeah, that's fair. Well, the lack of a bus existing does not mean the technology of a bus does not exist. We just need to bring it to those places. And he made sure to me at this point, he was like, it's going to be cheaper than a bus. How? You can fit a hundred people in some city buses. Yeah. And this is 30?

41:57This is two. Well, no, no, no. No, sorry. When he did that, that was for RoboVan. Right. But still, yes. I agree. I'm just making sure we have the right parts here. RoboVan. Okay. Even still. Which, by the way, the RoboVan looks exactly like the evil troop carrier from iRoboVan. They did this on purpose. Definitely. It's called Wheat Robot. I'm not sure why they want it to look like that. Also, who wants to wake up in the morning and get in their car and find someone's f***ing Starbucks cup in there? Or puke. Yeah. I think the technology aside, I don't think... Like, if you could say you could get a Model 3 or a Robotaxi and they're both capable of the exact same thing, I would personally prefer to own and not have my car do that.

42:43I would prefer like I can get in my car and my car drives itself and then it parks and then nobody else gets in my car because I prefer that. That's my own. And I want to drive sometimes. Yeah. I want the steering wheel. That's just me. I just think I kind of don't understand the idea of individuals owning individual ones. I more understand it in like say a taxi company decided that they were they have space. They have their own like there is a taxi parking lot right across the street from where I live. there's like 30 taxis there every night right so like if you had a bunch of inductive charging pads they could go out do their taxi thing throughout the day and then they come back that makes sense yeah but like why even pitch this as a thing that regular people can buy why not just say also your model 3 and model y will be able to do this they did say it it was just like super like glossed over and they felt very focused on these instead of like that the actual cars were gonna do that i think a lot of people were into the idea of your car making you money passively yeah kind of like remember like people would just be like my car my my computer like mines bitcoin when it's not yeah or whatever right like that person would love this cool yes i mean i also like why why two seats um so i i think again we are getting sort of caught in the details of it i think they could easily make a four person and a six person and a 10 person and a 12 person version of this i think this one is a two-seater and i think a lot of people's first thought was i take cab rides with three people all the time like this seems dumb but in the case of yeah having one or two people go somewhere and they probably have some stat that some majority of taxi rides or one person or something like that, fine.

44:28But I don't see any reason why they couldn't be a four-seater version of this. Counterpoint, Elon did say that most people are going to want two Optimus buddies, and all three of you cannot get in the cyber cab. Wait, he did? Yes. He said people want two Optimus buddies? He said people are going to want one, probably two Optimus buddies. Why would he want two? Why did he say anything he got? I don't know. Yeah, that's weird. Also, a few other things we should think about. One, who's going to decide how much a RoboCyber Uber costs? Does Tesla decide? Does the owner of the cars decide? Good question.

44:59That's a little scary. Number two. Do I have a rating? If this thing hits someone, who's liable? Are you liable for your autonomous car that you have no control over? I think in Waymo's currently parallel case, it would be Waymo that's liable. But nobody owns the Waymo. I own the RoboTaxi. Exactly. I don't think it matters who owns it. if you're if i drive your car and hit someone i'm liable yeah but if whoever's operating it yeah no one's operating yes but they're they are operating it they're operating the service right yeah there is a another variable that i've talked about before self-driving cars which is there is the world we live in now and then there's the perfect world that companies like tesla are hoping will exist in x number of years where every car is self-driving and every car is safer because of it and maybe they all communicate with each other blah blah whatever maybe but chance in between is this weird world where some cars are self-driving and some cars are driven by humans and it's actually really really difficult to flip that ratio to get self-driving cars so good among regular drivers yeah that people actually understand that they're better because they continue to be not like good at driving with waymos are really good waymos are really good but we see videos all the time of someone putting a cone in the road and then it just panics and stops for a while or a bunch of them honking in a parking lot.

46:20Just weird stuff where they're not as natural as maybe good human drivers. Because I will say, the average human driver, trash. Oh, yeah. Trash, let's be honest. Pretty bad. For sure. So if you can say that the average self-driving car is better than the average human, then that's a good stat. The ratio is going to be the biggest problem, and this is why it is surprising to me that Waymo has just started testing in New York City because San Francisco makes sense because those streets are not that congested at all ever. There's not that many people driving in San Francisco. In New York City? Yeah.

46:54I mean, power to them because there's going to be a lot of lawsuits and a lot of accidents pretty soon. It's either going to be a lot of new situations. A self-driving car in New York is either a lot of accidents or a lot of beeping. Yeah. Waymo's are already really good at beeping. I'm saying like if I'm a self-driving car going through New York, this is if you've ever driven in New York you know what I'm talking about but like people just pop out into the road all the time there's huge potholes there's insane construction like weird random pipes of hot air coming out of the subway random stuff happening everywhere right yeah if I'm a self-driving car I am either cruising through all of that with near misses constantly and that looks insane or I'm driving so slow that it is really safe and I am just piling up taxi drivers are just freaking out and people are trying to cut you off and then you can't react fast people are throwing cones at me yeah it's a it's a good time it's a good time i have a hot take about this whole tesla event yeah okay i think tesla's too early for all of this i think that's a very true like i think this this world they're trying to build i feel like is going to be what happens eventually just not in like in our lifetimes even yeah i feel like this whole event could have happened with way less scrutiny if they just never threw out a date or anything.

48:08Or like - Just made it a party. If it was just like a, man, the future seems cool. We made some cool prototypes here. But then throwing, this seems like 50 plus years distant future. And they're saying by 2027, this robo-taxing will come out. If they said like, these are the concepts that we foresee and these are the concepts that we are trying to build into our self-driving capabilities of our existing cars and our optimist robots and yes it's not running on its own software right now and it's kind of controlled and whatever i think that that would at least get people excited about the way off future idealism of that tesla's trying to build but elon even said like i'm usually pretty uh liberal about about delivery dates sure he did not say that well he didn't say okay he said optimistic correct yes um anyway yeah it's just why why and like clearly the the market responded it could have been yeah it could have been a really sick party where they didn't try and i i know no one's gonna say that they like tried to trick everyone but there are plenty of people who were tricked i saw tons of videos of people being i can't believe i'm talking to a robot right now and then everyone in the tiktok comments were like bro that's not a robot yeah or like that's a person it's a remote control i suppose it all kind of depends on what your goal is with this event if you're tesla you're like trying to decide what am i actually trying to accomplish by hosting this event if your goal is to get the public excited about tesla's vision of the future that's one thing if your goal is also to appear as a leader in this like driving for like very aggressive leader and a disruptor in a lot of this ai and self-driving stuff that's almost kind of a separate set of things you need to do i would have almost preferred them to do kind of what meta did i was just which is yeah they announced the orion glasses and they said look this isn't ready but this is the amazing set of tech that we've built and we think that if we iterate on this a little bit more maybe in two three more iterations this can be ready for the public.

50:19So this thing I'm about to show you right now, it's not ready, but it is the most advanced thing anyone's ever made. And look how that worked out for them. And that worked out great. Very positive. Because nobody's asking about price. Nobody's asking about release date. Nobody's asking when can I buy this thing. All the people who are excited about it are like, damn, I bet nobody else has prototypes this good. Everyone else who's pessimistic about it can go, ha, that's never coming out. And maybe they're right, it's not gonna come out for a long time, but they never said this one would come out.

50:46It's some future version that will come out. I would have been totally happy, me personally, if Tesla was like, look, this is the future we imagine. It's amazing. It's so far off. But we are clearly the leaders on our way there. And here's a little glimpse of some of the stuff we've been building that we think is the best anyone's ever made. And I wonder if the Tesla obsessives who have been sold the self-driving dream for existing Tesla cars would have rejected that because they believe that the cars are already fully capable of everything. but they're not i don't think they would have had to reject it they could have they could have just lived in a world where they do think it's coming soon but then tesla never would have had to say it is because the the tesla dream is like my car already has all the hardware it needs i mean this is elon said this year after year for like 10 years or whatever but like it's hardware complete like future complete it's built just needs regulation like it can already drive itself it's totally fine and many people are like yep yeah my car that i own right now should be able to drive itself with no one behind the steering wheel and that's up for debate but if you show a robo taxi that just does the same thing that the existing car already does it doesn't feel like some new advanced amazing tech it's just another concept car yeah so that's that's the only difference but i still feel like yeah tesla could have pulled a meta and probably just been a little more yeah uh this is what we've been working on it's also just the if say this this robo taxi does come out for its cyber cab i don't know whatever it say it does come out for 30 grand and the Model 3, especially used, is like 20 grand right now, I would pay more money to have a car that has a steering wheel that most of the time will drive me autonomously completely.

52:25But when I need the steering wheel, I can use the steering wheel. I would prefer that over a thing that only has two seats, that charges way slower, that can't really do road trips. This can't do road trips at all, right? Yeah, it's not designed to. It can only work in cities. nobody in cities lives in a house that has like a parking area where they can actually inductively charge this thing i mean 200 if it were 200 miles that would let's say i bought it and had the wireless pad in my garage that still could get me to and from work you know problem in your garage what you wouldn't even need in your garage i'm trying but in that scenario it would be fine if i had the wireless charging pad it still could get me and i don't live in the city It could get me to and from work, no problem.

53:09There's a whole lot of copper in that wireless charging pad. That thing's going to go quick. Yeah. Anyway, I don't know. Yeah, I agree with you. It's just very weird. I don't know. It seems like a stock pumping thing that didn't work out. Can you explain the RoboVun? Yeah. Wait, can I have a question before that? Sure. Why are we calling it RoboVun and RoboTaxi? I don't know. RoboTaxi. I guess that's because of what you want to say. Robotics. It sounded like something he thought of as a joke, but then never actually called it RoboVan. I don't know. Oh, okay. RoboVan. I don't think it matters what we call it.

53:50It doesn't. Yeah, okay. It looks like the Tony Stark Iron Man helmet and also the war vehicle for my robot. Sure. So in the same way that the RoboTaxi is, imagine a Model 3, but take out the steering wheel and pedals, and take out the back seats and now it's a robo taxi this is imagine a sprinter van but take out the steering wheel and pedals and turn all the seats towards the middle and at that point who needs a front and a back it's just a little little pod that rolls around through the streets they went a little crazy with the design it's got like no clearance you can't even see the wheels like i don't think we expect it to look like this at all totally but there's yeah that's there's no details wait his the way he announced it was this is Roboven.

54:36It's going to look like that. That's how he opened it. No, that's true. Did he say the future should look like this or something? He said the future should look like the future, and he also said, picture this thing coming towards you. Wouldn't that be sick? I would be terrified. There's going to be a bunch of optimist robots with machine guns coming out of it. That's not what I want. What happens if you need a vehicle that is bigger than a Model Y? the the Reboven the Reboven is this is a weird we're going to make this and it's going to look like that it sounds like see the slides before the presentation and it rolls out it's like oh wait wait wait and then when he goes full Rick and Morty you imagine going down the streets and you see this coming to water That'd be sick that's pretty much all he said about it but he said we are going to make this and it's going to look like this he just said that those are the specs

55:47specs it's going to look like this what I'm convinced that what he says on stage isn't real I think he's just going with the flow and trying to put on a show there's no way that this is like a thing he preemptively thought i mean he had slides on in front of him on like a little screen but they looked pretty think about it this way if this was any other company picture name a random car company honda if honda rolled this out and their ceo said we're gonna make this and it's gonna look like this what would your honest thoughts be no you won't bet really that's what c.s has been doing that about tesla though that's totally fair okay i had a lot of people point to the cyber truck for this they were like look everyone has said the cyber truck would never come out everyone said the cyber truck was too crazy too radical and look at it now it's out and it looks just like that that's fair and that's a totally fair point that is i do recall being one of the people who was like i don't see why the cyber truck won't come out it's pointy yes but they'll get there and it came out i think the The main thing was the original one had no mirrors and no door handles.

56:56There are some small details that are different. Totally fine. It has door handles now. Let's not get nuanced. Let's not get nuanced. Exactly. Yeah. That's like the motto of this event. But the Cybertruck does come out. So now you see literally anything else Tesla makes. And it's like when people defend anything Apple does because the iPhone was expensive. We're like, well, the iPhone was expensive and that worked out. So now this new expensive thing, it's probably going to work out. and I don't know if that logic works with everything that they announced. I think you can look at something crazy that this company that made the Cybertruck makes and go, that's more extreme than the Cybertruck.

57:31I don't think this is going to come out anytime soon. Do you know what's less extreme than the Cybertruck? What? The Tesla Roadster. True. We already know that's not coming out how they announced it because they've already re-announced it in a different way. Yeah. And it's still not announced. That was a new announcement. 2017? Yeah, yeah. So now it's seven years now? Seven years. Seven years later. They didn't even mention that at the event. Of course. They actually had a bunch of, they had like this little setup with a bunch of other stuff. They had Model Xs, Model Ss, and other cars out. I didn't see any roadsters at all.

58:04Oh, really? It's like a, just swept that under the rug, whatever. They, I don't know. I feel like Tesla has a branding problem right now because the Model 3 and the Y especially are just starting to look a little old in the tooth just because they've been around for so long. model 3 refresh looks pretty i think it looks better i think what david's saying is it's like there's they don't have their new flashy thing right they're not when when people did not a lot of people had teslas when like the s's were out they looked like really cool like very sports car yes and i feel like it would help them a lot to release the roadster just from a like branding perspective to have a halo car yeah because they don't really have i guess the cyber truck is the halo car now but it's so divisive that it's not like it's hard to look at the roadster and say that looks dumb yeah i think a halo car is typically super small volume and super expensive and not mass-produced and really well liked in general which they could do with so like every every car company has something like that like even if it's just a totally random like toyota they might have a super i mean super is not a super car but they might have a crazy super high car that you're like oh i would never buy that but that's cool that they made that like that lexus lfa existed the century the toyota century so if if if every car company that tries to sell you a car has some halo that you're never gonna buy but you're like oh it's taking some tech from that thing yeah the roadster feels like it could be that yeah for tesla but it's so low priority for them that they will literally announce a 16 passenger self-driving van before iron man helmet that looks like an iRobot military van so yeah cool look we all know elon says a lot of crazy stuff a judge in california recently said that he can you know say whatever he wants and and it's whatever like the thing he said at the end of the optimist and i have the exact quote and we don't even need to talk about it i just feel like it needs to be said that he got on stage and said this.

1:00:10The optimist section. Optimist robots, and he said they, but he was referring to optimist robots. Optimist robots will be producing products and services. I predict actually, provided we address the risks of digital superintelligence, 80 % probability of good, a good outcome. Look on the bright side, the cup is 80 % full. The cost of products and services will decline dramatically. And basically anyone will be able to have any products and services they want. It will be an age of abundance, the likes of which people have not, almost no one has envisioned. It will be something special. Is that a genie?

1:00:48We don't need to talk about it. I think we should all just go to bed tonight and just remember that Elon said that. The 80 % is like ringing in my head right now. I think that he tends to do this thing where he just throws things at the wall that seem way out of reach and sometimes they worked like the SpaceX rocket that we're about to talk about. That kind of stuff. Awesome, incredible. And I feel like Tesla was like that near the beginning of the company when he was growing at the beginning. And then for some reason, they just made this hard turn towards iRobot. Utopia. Right, utopia, right.

1:01:25Not me-topia, you-topia. A lot of companies have kind of lately become a little bit victim to this, like looking too far ahead because of all the AI promises that they have to make. And this is like the most extreme example. Like we were talking about Apple a couple of weeks ago. Apple's always like pretty lockstep. It's like, here's the product, now it's shipping. Here's the product, now it's shipping. Now this AI age in 2024, suddenly it's here's this new iPhone built from the ground up with Apple intelligence coming later, maybe soon. And also, Marquez, you're right. Apple does the sort of other thing that they're doing here where, oh, someone's about to start controlling my mouse.

1:01:59I just got the trackpad connected. Anyway, Apple did the other thing. Do you remember the launch of the original, the first Apple Watch Ultra, when the pitch was just sort of like, the world is dangerous. You will die and your watch will save you. You know, it's like, but like, yes, you're right. This is utopia is so much more extreme than I've ever seen one of these companies do. Yeah. So it feels to me like the more AI focused a company actually is, the more extreme and far out they have to project to feel like a leader in the space. If you're Apple, you've never been expected to project crazy AI stuff.

1:02:36If you're a Silicon Valley AI startup, you've got to go pretty hard. If you're Google, you've got to go pretty hard. If you're Tesla and you're talking about AI self-driving, AI full vision, autonomous robots walking around, and you need to project further than the autonomous humanoid robot you already showed two years ago, you've got to go so hard, so far. That's because people like Sindhra Pichai are out here saying AI is a more important invention than fire. So when you were saying those things, he said that to Neelai on Decoder. So when you're making these statements, you kind of have to try to live up to it.

1:03:20And the other thing is that AI so far we are being told is greater than fire, but we have not seen almost any benefits from it. Like outside of like what we already had from like. Are you kidding me? I erase backgrounds of photos all the time. I was going to say like we've already had machine learning stuff that was doing that stuff. This new wave that may be a bubble, may not be a bubble of AI has not yet produced really much. like there is some interesting stuff there's some voice cloning stuff there's fringe stuff that's useful for audio stuff it's great at MoMA there's a kind of interesting AI kind of interesting AI art exhibit right there's been disease detection yeah for sure consumer based it's pretty low key I just think there's so much money being put into artificial intelligence as a category and consumers are not really seeing the benefits of it yet, that these companies have to keep saying, just wait, in a couple of years, the world is going to look totally different.

1:04:30Before we, we've got to move on to this next step. I know. Because we are talking about this, and it made me realize, and this company is a sponsor of the show. They did not approve this message in any way. Where's Anthropic in all of this? While all these Google and Tesla, everyone's like our ai is going to like rip your current life to shreds and elevate you to the next one like a phoenix and anthrop's like claude can like read some of your emails if you want yeah their ceo did just did just write like a manifesto about the future of ai this weekend i just keep seeing like i'm a product company and ai is clearly like this tidal wave that's going to hit everything so i need to turn ai into product yes and so ai has had ai has had incredible advancements in things like like disease control or whatever like all these other things that we've seen structuring optimizing things in in all sorts of manufacturing and farming etc but if i am tesla apple or whatever i make products they feel the need to like okay i gotta package this into a product and sell it and that's when you start getting the most extreme weird far-fetching not ready yet versions of products so that's where we're at we're trying to like analyze if they're good products or not they're not done yet we we have talked and this is the last thing i promise this is like the fifth time we've said i promise we we have like talked about before how it's insane that apple's marketing is like the first phone built up like ground up for apple intelligence on the 16 i literally saw an ad on because i was like i don't know there was a football thing happening at the wedding that i was at the other night and like they had an ad where it was an apple ad and there was a person that like grabbed their iphone they're like yeah apple intelligence on the iphone 16 is pretty cool and like they just showed him and he was saying it's cool and it's like but you if unless you use a beta you can't use it at all yeah i've never that's insane like he didn't have apple intelligence well well he didn't it didn't show you can't the person watching that can't go it didn't show the phone it was just a guy that was like is that the new 16 he's like dude yeah apple intelligence on the new iphone 16 is really really awesome and i was just like but it's not out and you're telling people to buy the phone now but it's not it's i don't know anyway i just i just i just thought that was crazy that they were actually leaning into the this phone has apple intelligence when it does not i think we already live in an age of abundance guys that's true we truly live in an age of wonder anyway i like to live in an abundance of rockets trivia questions oh what about the rocket okay i'll do really really quick.

1:07:08We've tried to talk about space stuff on here before but we generally have no idea what we're talking about but SpaceX caught SpaceX caught a 70 meter stage falling back to Earth with this thing called chopsticks and it was pretty incredible. We can't do an hour on Tesla event and then five sentences on this amazing technology that just happened. Well we can do it after the break. Well it sounds like it's time for trivia! We'll do it after the break. Because it is pretty amazing. It's pretty sick. Before this very special trivia question, we here at the Waveform Podcast would like to wish you, Paul George, SPD recovery.

1:07:45Good words. Who? Don't worry about it. Today's trivia question, last week we did a Marquez one, so I figured this day we'll do, this day, today, we'll do an Andrew question, and David, we'll get you next week. But Andrew's very special trivia question. which of the following countries does not currently have a taco bell location within its borders would you like the list now or at the end let's hear it a sri lanka b cyprus c finland or d Mexico. Taco Bell? In Mexico, they just call that American food? Does not have a Taco Bell. Three of these countries, you can get a Crunchwrap Supreme. One of them...

1:08:37You're sure they all sell Crunchwrap Supremes? I will double-check the menu. You can definitely... No, I'm not so sure. I feel like I saw... Okay, the question is Taco Bell, though. Yeah, which one does not have a single Taco Bell location currently they could have historically had taco bells and not and not stuck okay wow cool this is a pure guess from me about you uh yeah we'll think about that a little bit but we'll be back after the break

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1:10:20You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. All right, welcome back. All right. We've talked a lot about far off future software, not yet delivered products that consumers may eventually get their hands on someday. Let's talk about something that's happening right now, which is advancements in rockets. Okay. Just to put it in context, you guys have heard this spiel before probably, but if anyone's not been paying attention, rockets have been single use for forever.

1:11:08And they're really, really big and really expensive and you launch a rocket and drop down into the ocean and that's it you don't get to use a booster anymore you got to build another one right so spacex was built around this idea of reusing rocket boosters totally cool idea but how do you reuse a rocket if it lands in the ocean well you land it somewhere after it launches and then use it again you refurbish it fill it back up with fuel and send it back to space again dramatically reducing the cost per launch of sending things into space incredible idea but like engineering wise that sounds crazy and then we started to see them actually pull this off they started doing tests they started doing test launches of like just a rocket booster flying up into space and then lowering itself back down to the launch pad and that was incredible it was on a pad in the ocean yeah first from the pad in the ocean not even into space a few hundred feet coming back down landing well no sorry just to correct it launched from the launch pad and landed on the pad in the ocean oh before all of that oh before all of that just launching from the ground up a few hundred feet and then coming back down just that amazing we've never seen that before holy they did it then they started launching higher and coming back down and launching that landing in the same spot but of course rockets scale goes hard so if you go really really high up the earth literally rotates underneath you you can't land in the same spot so they would land on a different location from where they took off and it would be like a launching pad in the middle of the ocean it would land and it would actually work and they kept getting further and further and more and more impressive and they seem to have gotten incredibly good at this because the latest version of this which we've just witnessed was i want to say the biggest rocket ever so 200 feet tall that's a building sized rocket that's 20 story building so wherever you live right now look outside and see if you can find the nearest 20-story building and imagine that taking off flying up into space getting some cargo into orbit and then lowering itself back down to the same launch pad where it took off where it got caught by the tower that it took off from so it literally had these giant arms that just closed in and caught the rocket yeah the rocket is 200 feet tall yeah this is the coolest thing i've ever seen yeah i wish i actually saw it in person with my eyes i have spent a long time since i've watched a rocket launch in person but this might be the coolest damn thing ever i would have loved to see it in person yeah just seeing the video like on the timeline had my jaw on the floor the videos don't i they can't do it justice either because you can't there's no scale so you're seeing this oh it's a rocket shaped thing coming back down here but But then you see like the cell phone videos of people who are like maybe a few hundred miles away and you can see this like building falling out of the sky with like rockets coming out of it.

1:14:03It's kind of sick. Yeah. So I'm sure I got some of the details wrong on like the progression of like how they launch these rockets and land them. But dude, they're landing rockets in giant tweezers. One of my favorite things about this is that the tweezers close on it, but it just has these little two like crab leg like linchpin things that are barely jutting out of the two 20 story building that hold the whole thing up. It like slowly lands on on the tweezers as the tweezers close. So originally it was supposed to be landing on its own legs, which I think is that what the Falcon 9 one did in the ocean?

1:14:40Yeah. But I guess they just decided it was so big and getting back that it's easier to put. Those are specific load-bearing points just to catch it. Which is crazy because the points were very small and it held up a 20-30. They're small and the rotation has to be correct, right? Because it comes in from the side. So if you're going parallel with that, it doesn't catch it. What's a 20-story, 200-foot building? Math is crazy. What is a nice math goes for? How tall is the Eiffel Tower? 1 ,000 feet tall. Okay. that's a little tall. It's a fifth of the Statue of Liberty. Imagine the Statue of Liberty.

1:15:15Actually, that would be so sick. Wait, really? Imagine the Statue of Liberty just blowing off into space right now. The Statue of Liberty is 300 feet tall with the top of the torch. So like Lady Liberty herself is probably 200 feet tall. Imagine the entire Lady Liberty flying back through this. Was this Starship? No, but then you have to catch her. I know. You gotta catch her right under her arms like this. Well, no, no. Starship is 165 feet tall. The booster that it caught is 230 feet oh yeah oh the stage that fell back down dang because starship still went i believe in this launch around the earth's atmosphere and landed in the indian ocean so the total height is like 365 i don't know what the total height is because i don't know i don't think it's directly on top of each other oh 400 feet yeah starship total is 400 feet yeah everything combined is is like some insane massive thing but just the rocket booster was wow 200 feet tall you know what's crazy about this too like imagine that 200 like lady liberty launching her into space you know how much like fuel you need to do that to just get that thing out into orbit and then imagine that falling down and needing to also still have fuel left over to push it to slow it down to slow it down like that's a that's and i know crazy i know nothing of really nothing about rocket science yeah but i in some of the books i've or audiobooks i think we're experts actually in some of the audiobooks i've heard it's just it obviously is an insane science experiment but all the things that can go wrong usually end in all of the evidence being exploded which is a unique challenge like you ever think about i don't know you fail at something and you can sort of in that you can look at what you did and see okay i was putting a puzzle together this piece didn't fit so i could pull it out and pull it back together but in rocket science yeah it'll be like oh we realized that the fuel was sloshing too much as it changed directions and that's why the whole thing exploded yeah so now we'll put it back together but like change the angles of some of the like fins inside the fuel tank so that it doesn't slosh as much when it goes back down yeah and they'll figure that out from the like remains on the ground this is insane crime scene yeah so the fact that it all worked out and that's that was the first try for this rocket for this yeah Yeah, which is wild.

1:17:28Already a pretty good idea. I did not know that was the first try. Was it? Yeah, it was the first try for this one. This impressed every single person on the planet except for Shania Twain. Wait, okay. Who's that? I need to know this. This is now the most interesting part of this. Why? Oh, damn it. Because that don't impress her. So, you're a rocket scientist. That don't impress a meme. I'm so much. I thought she actually commented on it. So you've got the brains, but do you have the touch, Andrew? I think you're all right. I have a question for you guys about this. So like, it probably takes like, what, like two hours, an hour to go up?

1:18:0615 minutes? How long does it take to go all the way around? I think it was 45 minutes. 45 minutes, okay. So it takes... This specific one. It takes 45 minutes, you know, to go up, round the world, land back down, right? That gives you another 23 hours and 15 minutes where your rocket could be making you money.

1:18:23The thing is, it is self-driving already. That's true, it is self-driving. Full self-driving. And there was a point in time in which Elon said that you would be able to get to China in like 40 minutes on a rocket like this. He did say this. You don't have to productize everything. Let's not get nuanced. Let's not get nuanced. But all this to say, congrats to everyone at SpaceX because this was freaking incredible. It was wild to watch. Yeah, it was so cool to watch. And I recommend watching it on YouTube. and thank you to Scott Manley in 2013 for coming up with this idea and that's a reference six people will get and I love you for it none of those people are in this room they are because every time I mention Kerbal Space Program did this happen in Kerbal Space Program?

1:19:11one of the original super legendary Kerbal Space Program let's plays was this 200 part series where he wouldn't let a single part get destroyed Every single part had to get returned to Earth. And then eventually the rockets did become reusable, where he never actually loaded them back into the game. He would just load a fuel truck that he designed. Oh, wow. Very cool. You know what else starts with the same letter as awesome? Animatronics. Oh. Adobe. Okay, got it. So Adobe, okay. Every year Adobe has a conference called Adobe Max. It's basically their little conference where they show off all the new updates to all their creative apps.

1:19:53I was there last year. That's where they introduced the whole content credentials thing and a bunch of other stuff, which we made a video about on the Studio Channel. Now Adobe is definitely an AI company. Yeah. Because every update they make now is an AI update. They're all in. I do want to say there was something interesting. Let's see. This is quoting directly from The Verge. It's an article. It's like a mini article. Adobe looks to a new era for generative AI. After joking about AI being a drinking game trigger at max, Adobe's cheap product officer said the company is moving away from the prompt era of the tech, which cheapened and undermined the craft of creative professionals by generating things from text descriptions.

1:20:38Which is interesting because a lot of these things are text-based updates. But, okay. if this is true if they're actually moving away from the like type something into a text box and generate it because nobody really wants that like some people do but it's not it's a cool demo what we yeah the coolest things i think that they showed off at max were things that were kind of just magic behind the scenes ai updates that made a lot of things easier to do that people like creative professionals already want to do yeah um so we can either go through all the updates from each platform or we can just go through some of the interesting gen ai stuff i mean i'll i'll highlight the one thing i saw which is on on my twitter timeline i or i think someone put in slack there's a video of a compositing tool that's like built into photoshop so we keep talking about how the barrier for entry for a lot of these tools gets just a little bit lower with each of them like oh you click a button on your phone you can erase the background of a photo this one was like full-on yeah compositing heavy editing but built into photoshop so you need to have photoshop and know how to use it but the tool was like i dragged a png of me into this background image of a table and i hit remove background and it just perfectly removes the background and then i hit i forgot what the button's name was it was like synthesize or something yeah something like that harmonize It said harmonize.

1:22:05She hit the harmonize button, and the harmonize button did all of the work of matching two different images in a compositing effect, which takes typically a lot of work, matching lighting, matching exposure, matching color, and just blended the two PNGs together so that it looked like the subject was in the background. And she did that with a couple of different objects until she created a scene, and then the scene was just formed out of thin air. So it wasn't a real image. It was just something she made with this harmonize tool. and that felt like stuff i've seen from some of the more ai forward editors not from photoshop so you can tell adobe's turning the page and like really embracing okay seems like our users actually want to use this stuff let's give them the best we can very impressive because it understands the lighting it understands like the spacing of things and it casts shadows um in the example she puts herself in the scene with her boyfriend that lives across the world and she uses a picture of her which has like different kinds of lighting on her face because it's a photo of her like in front of i don't know some sort of blinds or something and it completely gets rid of all those shadows and makes it so it looks like they have the same lighting source on them very cool i need to note that this is a project perfect blend and their projects are not yet available and not yet ready or going to be available in the near future oh like meta yeah but yeah this is like during their sneaks event where they basically say this is technology we're working on we will probably have this within the next couple of years ah no firm release date yes but but adobe does generally ship this stuff within like a year or two after they show it off which is quite cool they also had another um interesting ai thing that ellis got very excited about that was an audio generation can i do one more photoshop one before we get to sure yeah um this is just more because it's kind of a reference to something we talk about all the time on the pod here but there's one called find distractions which in this video that they show it's essentially a photo of that's san francisco right yeah san francisco of all the houses but there's a ton of power lines in the way and it can find the power lines and remove all of them without having to select you just click find distractions it finds them and masks over all of them and it feels so much like the chain link fence from google io yeah from years ago yeah so i thought that was pretty awesome especially since you don't have to select each like yeah each one but right cool sorry they're actually able to do that that would be awesome um yes okay so the other like big ai thing that they had was a audio one where you were able to basically it was like an animation tool and they had these animations of these uh dinosaurs right that's what you're talking about yeah yeah So they had these animations of these like dinosaurs and they wanted to produce these roars for them.

1:24:57And so the idea is like you can sort of generate a sound based on a text prompt and a vocal input. So the guy on stage goes rawr, rawr. the idea is that it takes like the intonation and the intensity and all of the things that you are voicing and then it generates a sound based on a text input so he said like dinosaur roar or something and it created a very um very cool dinosaur roar is that what that's what you were excited about right yeah i think so yeah because you said you'd be in the audio room pew-pewing a lot yeah i mean there's definitely like certain like when you're sound designing it can be you can have a sound in your head and then it can be like i actually don't know what that sound is like one of the hardest ones for me was like the apple vision pro cinematic intro the shot of the band tightening like that's essentially silent you know so like what what and like i had a ratcheting i heard like ratcheting and like fabric rubbing on each other but it's like what what actually like what do you search yeah what do you write you know and so um yeah So it'd be easy to just go like...

1:26:10Yeah. But will I get it? Is this a thing? Oh, this is also one of their sneaks things. Are they going to make this and will it look like that? Probably in a couple years. I thought that was kind of funny. Clearly you guys didn't. Yes, it will look like that. Oh, I see. By 2026. Yes, you're going to... They're... Yes, maybe. I don't know. It'll cost us some$30 ,000. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, definitely Adobe if you want to. I would like to play. In Premiere, they now have generative expand, which is where you can extend a clip either from the beginning or end by up to two seconds. Unfortunately, it can only do 1080p at 24 FPS.

1:26:53For now. For now. Interesting. I guess this could be useful if you just have, like, if you walk out of the room and there's, like, a plant moving and it just makes it continue to move. if you just need slightly more b-roll or something this is good for all those people on camera who like to cut immediately after the action happens yeah which is way too many people yeah but yeah yeah yeah is this available right now this is this one is available this is available right i think mariah was this is an update yeah um they have image to video on web where you can use text prompts with a source image to make b-roll from photos which is interesting um they showed this example of this astronaut taking out a ethernet port from like a from like a cable array um or a hard drive array or something and they had it like extend the clip and also generate part of the clip in it it did not look good it definitely looked very like as he's taking the cable out the ethernet port is just sort of wobbling in this like really weird way so i don't you know i think that's one of those things that was also a tech demo that will eventually get better surprisingly this is actually available uh limited to five seconds at 720p though which 720p is not i don't think anyone wants to use a 720p clip maybe for web i don't know uh and then in lightroom they added a bunch of instant edit options that are like those magic edits that google photos has classic and my take on this is they're trying to get more people in the subscription realm or get trying to get more people to use their services more often because lightroom has traditionally been structured as a like professional tool and now all of these apps like google photos and apple photos are adding these like editing tools built in and because lightroom is a subscription service people are using Google Photos and Apple Photos more.

1:28:53So I think that they want people to understand, like Lightroom, it can be a power user tool, but we also now are introducing all these auto-edit buttons that can make it so you can stay in our ecosystem. Yeah, that was like most of the very big stuff. That's cool. They also had like a 2D to 3D animation thing for, what is it called? The thing that Tim uses a lot. The computer. One design? No. No. Oh, Illustrator. Illustrator. Illustrator. They had Illustrator. And then they, yeah, they had like an easy 3D designer for Illustrator as well. Yeah. It was sounds like Tim's facing off against AI again pretty soon.

1:29:36Round two. Round two. It was a cool event. I think that like last year it was last year was just so cringe because it was all like text to image based stuff. And because that's all they had. They were trying to compete with Canva. and everything that they were doing felt like it was like not enabling creativity but replacing creativity uh this year they definitely had more things that felt like they modified or made easier tasks that you already had to do and the fact that one of their uh that their chief product officer said they're moving more towards that direction i think it's a good direction to head towards um so i have one maybe far out question okay does this potentially make people better at editing or worse at editing because they don't want skills to do it by hand is what you're saying like or because if this tool gets really really good like some of the examples i saw were people just tossing in like ingredients that just shouldn't ever be blended like if i was gonna composite three photos together i would at least try to match the lighting and like try to like match the angles but you don't even have to with these so i feel like i would get worse at this because of using a good tool but the results are so good that it's better than what i could have made so i'm getting better are you worse at math because you can use a calculator damn oh yes yes yes i am but i'm getting the answers better i think exactly i think even with all these examples someone who's very good at editing would still do a better job or someone who put the effort in to match the lighting in the photo would still do a better job i thought it was still pretty obvious those people were getting into the photo but it was good would they get a better result if you spent the extra time pre like taking the photos i guess we don't matching lighting i think so maybe i hope i do agree though that i think a lot of this seems like it would help with like uh the busy work aspects of things so it'd make you better at editing in the sense that you could probably hit a deadline faster of getting rid of the things that are just like super like minuscule that just take forever like busy work kind of stuff but yeah over time those are the things that keep you sharp and uh keep you like continually working and finding better ways so yeah maybe worse you are relinquishing control of the creative aspect in order to have it be more efficient.

1:32:03Because the results it gives you could be better or worse, but it depends on what your bar for quality is. Like magic wand. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I think that the compositing area of movie production and that kind of stuff has been very quickly been being automated by artificial intelligence, especially in movies. Like, you can key things instantly now. It's crazy. and the people that I had a friend that was working at a movie studio and for like four years he was an intern there and all he was doing was masking manual masking oh my gosh yeah dude I can do there's a plugin now for motion VFX that lets me do automatic rotoscoping I just click the subject and it tracks forward through all the frames and it does a moving mask cut out for me like automatically and it's really good it's accurate it does individual hairs I'm like well I will never need to learn how to do rotoscoping now damn I find this interesting because we talked a lot about Google's re-imagine feature right and there's been this big discussion around like the access that you have to creating something that is not real and this is sort of an in-between because with Google it was like it's on your phone everyone has a phone everyone can use Google Photos it's a button or a Pixel 9 or whatever.

1:33:29The difference here is there is a little bit of a barrier because you have to kind of understand how to use Photoshop in general because you have to understand layers. You have to understand cropping and putting things around. It's still obviously creating the opportunity for people to make things way faster. I think there's going to be positives and negatives that come from that capability. But at least there's the barrier of needing to have a creative tool. Sounds like what a CEO would say. Well, I'm not. Funny enough, that's where David was last week, accepting his position as CEO of Adobe.

1:34:03Adobe CEO. Yeah. I don't know. Sick. Anyway, so yeah. Definitely something to keep an eye on to see how much of this stuff actually ships and when it does and how good it is and how useful it is to maybe some of our workflow. Yeah. And then we'll talk to Tim. Make a video with him. Hello, Tim. Well, I think that's about it for this week. A lot of AI stuff, a lot of AI self-driving, a lot of AI Photoshop stuff, a lot of Lightroom, Premiere, and Kindles. Colored ink. Really good stuff. We should end it, though, with, of course, some total shot-in-the-dark guesses at some trivia questions. Trivia, trivia.

1:34:40Trivia. Trivia, yeah. I completely forgot this episode started with Kindles. What a journey we've been on. That wasn't last week. Quick update on the score. Marquez with 20 Andrew and David tied at 22 Alright Did you guys get points last week? I think Marquez got one point Marquez got two I think Did you get two? I thought it was just one Okay first question When was the first Kindle? Oh right Released I should finish that sentence The first Kindle Damn The actual question was How many years has it been since the first Kindle? I ain't doing that math can we just put the ear I'm gonna steal the new reason think about what songs were popular actually when you held your first Kindle

1:35:35flip them and read that's the thing I never owned a Kindle I originally put 2006 as well what do you guys got I put 2009 nope I put 2006 nope I put 2004. 2004, no. I'm guessing it was 7. Closest without going over, though, Andrew gets the point. What was it? 2007. That was pretty close. Question number two. But first, a quick correction. Since speaking about AI, Marquez sent me a Verge article about the Anthropics CEO talking about ushering in a new utopia. That's the one I was mentioning. Right, right. I just didn't realize he literally used the word utopia. Indeed. Everything's bad. Chill. Anyway, onto something more fun.

1:36:20Taco Bell around the world. The dong herd around the world. The dong herd. Which of the following countries does not have a Taco Bell location currently within its borders? Hit it. A. Sri Lanka. B. Cyprus. C. Finland. Or D. Mexico. Oh, sorry. You're good.

1:37:00I'm just going off vibes, but I'm also not sure if I spelled it correctly. All right. Lots of people put in Cyprus. That's true. We all put Cyprus. We all put it. Guys, I hate to break it to you. There are multiple Taco Bell locations in the country of Cyprus. I don't know. Wow. It just felt like the odd one out for Taco Bell. I almost put Sri Lanka, but what is that? The correct answer is Mexico. Mexico. Okay, that would make the most sense. They gave it a try, folks. Did they really? It just feels... Really? Yeah, they all closed. I mean, I get why. Wow. Yeah. But it's just too close to the U.S.

1:37:34that that's why I had a hard problem imagining it. Yeah. Zero? You can get real tacos in Mexico. Zero. I know. Yeah, but that's... Taco Bell's not Mexican food. It's totally different. Yeah. It's like Domino's. I like my pizza. I also like my dominance. Yeah, I feel the same way, brother. Not a single one. Wow. Well, today I learned something new. Well, cool. I can still go to Cyprus then. But not Mexico. Good place to end it. I think we've covered just about everything there was to cover this week. Much more upcoming, of course, so get subscribed if you haven't already. And we'll catch y 'all soon in the next one.

1:38:15Peace. Wave 4 was produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Rovin. We're partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro music was created by Vane Silk. Bingo. Let's go. Bingo. Let's go.

1:38:42Alright, let's talk about the tweezers.